Tag Archives: technology

Lots of new stuff to fiddle with!

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So there’s been lots of new stuff I’ve been able to fiddle with recently. I started a Twitter account, so if you have an account there, let me know so I can follow you. The reason I went with Twitter, over something like Facebook’s status message is that it’s able to be plugged into the rest of my online life. You know the old mantra: one life, one status message? :P For example, by updating my status on Twitter, it also updates: my Facebook status message (via the Facebook Twitter application), my buddy status in Pidgin (which controls my status for AIM, GoogleChat, and more) (via the Pidgin Twitter Status plugin), and even my blog (see the box “Poo-Tee-Weet?” on the right) (via Twitter For WordPress). I still haven’t convinced myself how much I’m going to use Twitter, but for the unfamiliar, it’s a way to share a brief message with your friends online. It might be the answer to “what are you doing?”, “what are you thinking?”, or even just a quote or a link. You can even update your status via text message so that things can stay current if you’re doing something interesting away from the computer. We can’t ever get too far away from the net, right? Previously, I didn’t use the FB status messages very much, but I’m hoping that I’ll keep up with Twitter at least somewhat regularly.

Also, Sadie liked using Google Chrome, but found it a bit buggy still. It kept freezing on her and/or becoming really slow. So I suggested trying to use Firefox regularly in lieu of her usual IE 7. She really enjoyed that Chrome’s home page had a visual listing of all your most regularly viewed pages, which was an interesting twist on Opera’s Speed Dial. I found that a plugin by the same name for Firefox and I think that’ll work out pretty well for her. I’ve actually been using this for the past day, and I like it as well. It’s nice to be able to program your commonly used websites in for a nice quick shortcut. And even better, I like that similar to a phone’s speed dial, it’s easier to access these bookmarks with a keyboard shortcut. Ctrl+1, Ctrl+2, etc. now gets me to my most commonly viewed sites.

To keep myself organized now that school’s started again, I’ve picked up a nice little to-do list manager called Remember The Milk (RTM). It can be used via a web interface, but I really enjoy using it with a Linux-only tool called Tasque. Tasque can be plugged into Do, so that adding tasks to my to-do list is as easy as a few button presses. The Do plugin is great because you can even add a task to your list by highlighting some text in a document, email, or webpage. For users on other operating systems, there’s a variety of RTM clients available if you don’t like having to use another website to manage your to-do list.

And then there’s Dropbox, which finally came out of private beta recently. They’ve got a freeware Linux client available, but I have yet to actually download and install it. Dropbox is a great little program that will keep a folder synchronized between all your computers. Ryan Paul of Ars wrote up a great review of it recently.

So all-in-all, just what I need. A bunch of new things to fiddle with! :P

Preserving our history

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I recently read that Jackson Browne released a sequel to his popular album Solo Acoustic, Vol. 1 from a few years ago. It’s one of my favorite albums of the past few years, and this was coming from someone who had no idea who Jackson Browne really was when I first heard it. If you haven’t heard that album, it’s worth the $8.99 on Amazon mp3, so just buy it. His sequel album, aptly titled Solo Acoustic Vol. 2, was released a few weeks ago, and I will need to download it. However, considering what little I knew about Mr. Browne was derived from this album, I decided it would be a good idea to learn a little more about him from Wikipedia. While reading about his fantastic song called The Pretender (lyrics), I noticed a link at the bottom to a YouTube video of him singing it live. It was great.

And then I saw it, right there in the YouTube sidebar. It was a live concert performance of his song Load-Out/Stay from 1978. You don’t understand. Ever since I heard it a few years ago, this has been one of my top 3 favorite songs of all time. And I have a LOT of favorite music. You can see him singing it, right there on stage at his piano. And then it dawned on me. Without the Internet, I would never have been able to see this footage. I’ve heard the song a thousand times, but to see him sitting there, 30 years old with his California hippie haircut, singing it? I’ll let it speak for itself. Sometimes we lose sight of the Internet and what it can be. I think this speaks volumes.

Man I wish they still made music like that. If you’d like to hear more Jackson Browne check out These Days (or the original cut, sung by Nico) (lyrics).

Portable Electronic Medical Records

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I have been meaning to do a long post on EMRs for a while. After reading a recent post on Ars Technica on this issue, I decided this is as good of a time as any.

Although Mr. Gitlin readily admits that EMRs are unlikely to solve the problems of “inefficiency” in the medical community within the US, he claims it will decrease cost in the end. He disdainfully alludes to “high cost” in the US system without ever questioning why the costs are so high besides noting that our focus is generally on emergent and not preventive care. Now we can argue this point to death, but if you’d like an enlightened point of view on this subject, I suggest you read any number of PandaBear, M.D.‘s blog posts. I’ll leave this one lie.

My next issue was the fact that Gitlin is actually making two very distinct arguments for EMRs without differentiating the two. First, he argues that EMRs are a perfect way to organize an office. They free the workplace of excess paperwork and can make an efficient way to keep track of “billable” services, something very important to physicians. This much I can definitely support. There are considerations, but I think in the long run, physicians will be better off doing more on computers and less on paper. At the same time he alludes to EMR portability, which is a whole separate can of worms.

The long and short of it is, people need to decide what they want. Currently HIPAA dictates that medical records are on lock-down, and the only people who have access to them are are you and those whom you designate. These “others” could be someone like a spouse or a parent or another physician. I think preserving this privacy is (at least mildly) important from a patient’s perspective. After all, it’s not everyone’s business what your latest test results are or what diseases you’ve been diagnosed with or what medications you’re on. However, from a health care professional’s perspective, this is a frustrating impediment. It does matter to them what your test results were last Monday in the E.R. It’s helping dictate your treatment. Acting like electronic medical records are going to magically make that red tape junkie HIPAA disappear is naive. They might make it easier to transport the information once approval has been given, though.

If people are treating their medical records with that kind of security, then the security vulnerabilities exposed by making things electronic are significant. Even the most secure computer systems are vulnerable to attacks, and considering that many of these systems will be running on Microsoft platforms, there is an increased risk to any data on entire computer networks. If the secretary opens a bad email attachment, is it going to worm its way into the EMR database server and start uploading all the records to someone else’s computer? My point is not that the type of security necessary to run such a system is impossible. Just that it will be a lot of work for everyone, including patients. If a patient needs to “grant access” to their health care providers, they are going to be the gateway into administering their electronic medical record. This means strong passwords, which will probably need to be changed frequently. Are they going to want to do that? How about health care providers? Sure most hospitals have a (probably sub-standard) IT department, but what about your average medical practice? Are they going to be able to employ an IT professional (or pay for the temporary services of one) to set up and maintain these records? All of this is simply going to add cost and overhead to a community that is already overly criticized for how “inefficiently” it works.

The business model that will probably end up working is one where large companies are in charge of the records and medical practices pay fees for the use of their services. In other words, Dr. Jones pays $X every month to have his patients’ health records stored online by a company. When he needs to view the patient’s records, he simply logs in from his office computers (or even from home) and downloads the information. If he has new test results, they would be uploaded. This actually could be a fairly profitable market. It’s basically what’s being set up by Google. For this to be successful, they would still need cooperation from the patient, however, and there would still be security issues. While there would be IT professionals in charge of keeping the data secure, the centralization of data would make it more of a target for criminals. There probably aren’t very many people who would try to break in to Dr. Jones’ patient EMR database since it’s only for a small number of patients. If a large company was hosting hundreds of thousands of patient records, it’s more of a target.

My biggest issue with Gitlin’s argument is that he claims portable EMRs will eliminate (or even significantly reduce) the amount of duplicate testing that is performed and thus save everyone money. See this is an issue that people have to deal with concerning health care in the US. Doctors are skilled professionals. If someone comes to them (especially a specialist) with a problem, they’re going to want their own x-rays and CT scans, not ones from another facility. That’s not to say that they shouldn’t be using them, but considering there’s no incentive for them to work any differently, I highly doubt whether implementing portable EMRs is going to change things. After all, today doctors can get x-rays and CT scans from other institutions if their patients say it’s ok. They just don’t use them.

Gitlin did address my main concern with EMR portability, which is a less concrete aspect: the standards. See right now, there are no standards set in the US for electronic medical records. There’s no “right way” for information to be stored in EMRs, so if you want to transmit information from one doctor’s office to another, they probably need to be using the same program on their end as you are on your end. This is a really bad way to deal with any sort of information. The government has laid some loose guidelines, but nothing really telling people what should be done. They want the market to sort it out. The problem is businesses are all going to try to come up with a proprietary format that will gain a significant market share. This way, everyone has to use their software and their databases. In other words, all the businesses are competing to see who’s going to “win” this race to control everyone’s medical records, and by “winning” the market, they will control the standard and thus the future of the industry. This is a “great” way to form an industry from a business perspective (lock everyone into your format) but a horrible way from an end user’s perspective (doctors and patients). It would be really great if we could nip this issue in the bud now, before any one company has a market share. This way there won’t be a fight to get one big company to relinquish it’s power. Plus, it would be great if EMRs used an open standard so we can continue to have cross-platform competition in the future. We can learn a lot from the mistakes of the past on issues like this.

Look for a future post on FOSS operating systems and EMR programs to tackle some of the issues I brought up here.

A Little Explanation

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Well considering the amount of talking I’ve done about “free software” and “GNU/Linux” over the past few weeks, it’s about time I explain myself. During the past 6 months or so, I’ve learned a lot about a little thing called free software. I’d like to take a few minutes and explain what free software is and why I find it so exciting. I will try to do this in “laymen’s terms” so that everyone can follow me, if they want to. [UPDATE: This post got a little lengthy. If you'd like to just skip to the final thoughts, click here.]

Free software is all over the place, and you probably use it (at least in a sense) every single day. Most web servers are run on GNU/Linux, so almost every web page you view is displayed by free software. This blog is powered by WordPress, which is free software, and being free software is what has made WordPress the most powerful and widespread blogging platform in the world. It’s so good that proprietary software can’t even come close to competing anymore. But what is free software?

In 1983 (n.b. the year I was born), a man named Richard Stallman became fed up with his situation. Back then, computers were mainly only found at universities and large companies and the main operating system (MS Windows is an operating system) that computers ran on was called Unix. Unix was a proprietary operating system (created by AT&T employees), meaning that AT&T owned the computer code that made up Unix. Other computer programmers were not able to edit this code or change anything about the way Unix worked. If you didn’t like the way Unix did something, tough cookies. This is very similar to the way Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X work today.

Stallman, then a programmer for the MIT AI Lab, decided he didn’t like this way of doing business. For him, computer software was just a way to make a computer do what he wanted it to. But what if you didn’t like Unix or if a Unix (or one of it’s programs) didn’t work the way you thought it should? You should be able to change that program and “fix” it to suit your needs. Since Unix was proprietary, Stallman couldn’t “fix” it or change it at all without infringing on copyrights and patents.

Rather than face prison, Stallman decided to write his own operating system. It would be just like Unix in many ways, except not Unix. He quit his job at MIT (to keep them from claiming any right to what he was going to write) and founded a project called GNU (say guh-NEW) in 1983. GNU was to be an operating system, just like Unix, except that all of it’s code would be open and free to anyone who wanted to examine it. Futhermore, if you wanted to change it to fit your needs, go right ahead! Thus the concept of free software was born. With it was born the Free Software Foundation (FSF)

When you hear the term “free software”, Stallman warns that you need to think of “free” as in “free speech” (liberty) and not as in “free beer” (no cost). This becomes a confusing definition, since many free software projects are also available at no cost. He states that in order for software to be completely free, it must comply with 4 rules. 1. The freedom to run the program, for any purpose. 2. The freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs. 3. The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor. 4. The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits.

Thus, you should be free to redistribute copies, either with or without modifications, either gratis or charging a fee for distribution, to anyone anywhere. Being free to do these things means (among other things) that you do not have to ask or pay for permission. You should also have the freedom to make modifications and use them privately in your own work or play, without even mentioning that they exist. If you do publish your changes, you should not be required to notify anyone in particular, or in any particular way. -GNU.org

Now, you might be saying to yourself, “Who cares? I’m not a programmer”. Fair enough. Most end users do not have the knowledge or desire to modify a program (but for anyone who does, this is a major issue). But even end users have two very good reasons to want free software. First and foremost it gives you permission to use it. You can install it on your computer, everyone in your family’s computers, and your friend’s computers. You never have to ask anyone for permission to use it, and you can use it for whatever purpose you want. If I were to “buy” a song on iTunes, the program limits how much I am able to use it: “iTunes DRM-protected music includes audio with a bit rate of 128 kbps and allows users to transfer songs and videos to up to five computers, burn seven copies of the same playlist to CD, and sync to an unlimited number of iPods.” (Apple). The craziest part of that is that I can only burn 7 copies of the same playlist to a CD. With how easily cd’s get scratched, broken, or lost, are you kidding me iTunes?!

The second freedom available to end users is the ability to invoke change. Just because you do not know how to program or how to change something about a program, does not mean you shouldn’t be able to. There are plenty of freelance computer programmers out there. If you’d like a program to be able to do something new or change the way it works, you can always pay a programmer to change it. If you’d like to share your changes with the community, you may find you have a following, and your changes could make it in to the next version. If others do the same, you’ve got a lot of new features! Additionally, free software projects tend to have a strong programmer backing. This means that merely requesting a useful feature can often get it incorporated into a future release, assuming the author(s) think it’s a good idea. But again, you always have the choice to make changes yourself (or through a surrogate programmer).

Overall though, the point of the free software movement is that it’s a matter of principle. It’s a philosophy. The two most popular responses in defense of proprietary software are “I don’t have any problems with [software]” and “There’s no free software that does what [software] does (or it doesn’t do as good of a job).” The fact of the matter is that no matter how “good” a piece of non-free software is, it is inherently flawed by being non-free. It is the free software philosophy that “[software] might be great, but it restricts my freedoms. As such, I’m choosing not to use it, and/or I will wait until a free version is available.” This can be a hard dish to swallow for most people (including me). This attitude can be especially difficult when the software you’re talking about is used for something like work or school. I think the point (at least for me) is that a concerted effort must be made to choose free software when at all possible. This might mean making a few sacrifices, but understand that it comes with many more advantages.

I know a lot of you reading this (if you’re even still reading it) are still not too concerned with your software freedom. The main purpose of this article was just to let you know that free software exists and what it is. I don’t hope to necessarily persuade you to use free software, but rather to make your decision to use proprietary software a conscious one. To illustrate my point, take this crude example. A slave’s life is easier than a free man’s in some respects. After all, one could argue that being told when to work, rest, bathe, and eat would be simpler than having to keep track of everything for yourself. But alas, not too many people volunteer to be slaves or to go to prison. My point is that freedom is something you have to want and more importantly something you have to fight to preserve every day because it’s always going to be easier for someone to rule you. And they’ll always be willing to do it, especially if you’re going to pay them for it.

I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death! -Patrick Henry to the Virginia House of Burgesses (1775)

Thanks for reading!

Moving Day

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I’m moving my domain over from GoDaddy to my brand new ANhosting account. What difference does this make for you? Probably not much. I’ve been using ANhosting for a week or two with the RMstudents website and I liked them so much (and they were having such a good Halloween hosting special) that I decided to move my site over here. Plus now I can ping other websites without a problem! Namely the wonderful ping-o-matic.

Whowas?

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According to the New York Times BITS section, whois may become whowas due to it’s incredible abuse by spammers. If you’re not familiar, WHOIS is a large database similar to a phone book for websites. You can look up who owns a particular website and what their contact information is. In order to protect your information, most domain registrars offer private registration (like an unlisted phone number) to owners in order to prevent them from receiving spam. The growing necessity for nearly everyone to have private registration has forced ICANN to question whether the database(s) should just be scrapped.